Make your own icons for iOS 7

Sick of your iPhone’s icons? Iconical enables you to roll your own – to a degree.

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How do you feel about those new iOS 7 icons, then? Do you hate them? Do you think they resemble the sort of unnatural boiled sweets that, playground rumours insist, give you cancer? Do you wish you could get rid of them and make your own?

You may be in luck. Iconical’s a crafty little app that, to an extent, enables you to create new app icons. That 'to an extent' bit’s important, since you’re only likely to be able to create new icons for a small proportion of your apps.

Mail, Maps, Messages, Phone and Safari are all supported within Iconical, and if you visit this page you’ll find the special shortcuts you need to create icons for iTunes, App Store, Calendar, Music and other default apps. There’s also support for a number of third-party apps, particularly the bigger-name ones.

The actual icon creation bit's a little basic, you can snap a photo or download or copy one from the internet, then scale it to fit in the icon template. There are also drawing tools; either draw your own icon from scratch or scribble over a photo or imported image. The drawing bit's pretty unsophisticated; if you want to create your own artwork you’ll be better off using a real graphics package and then importing.

The clever bit is how it creates the icon; some kind of wizardry that takes advantage of Safari’s 'Add to Home Screen' option in a way that we almost but don’t quite understand. The fun bit is that you can add special parameters to some shortcuts; for example if you want a custom phone icon that immediately calls a certain number. Plenty of possibilities!

It’s a bit of a shame that you can’t go to town on all your icons, but if you fancy a pop at creating your own custom version iOS then Iconical’s a good place to start.